Jozef Imrich, name worthy of Kafka, has his finger on the pulse of any irony of interest and shares his findings to keep you in-the-know with the savviest trend setters and infomaniacs.
''I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center.''
-Kurt Vonnegut

World peace for your eyes only Waiting for the other shoe to drop Everyone likes to talk about how young families are revitalizing big cities. The truth of migration patterns tells another story. The sustainable city of the future will rest on the revival of traditional institutions that have faded in many of today’s cities

Ellen Moncure and Joe Wong first met in school and then fell in love while living in the same dorm at the College of William and Mary. After graduation, they got married and, in 1999, moved to Washington, D.C., where they worked amid a large community of single and childless people.

• The Luxury City vs. the Middle Class; [Ron Rosenbaum loves airport best-sellers: “I see them as our Nostradamuses, literary canaries in the dark coal mines of our paranoia.” His latest find... Our nuclear fantasies have gotten more hard-core; Literary tourism. Even Shakespeare’s place of birth is a Victorian construct, a phony home for an aspiring bard, a taste of “merrie olde England” 'You've Read the Book, Now Take a Look! ]• · The Cirkus of Totalitarianism looks back at communism from a variety of angles Acute history; Where have all the Muses gone? Platonic ideals, goddesses, mistresses, lovers, and wives whom poets and painters called on for inspiration? Not a good sign for the arts Where Have All the Muses Gone? • · The Soloist is a sentimental film that makes cheap use of a remarkable book about an encounter with the problems of a homeless, mentally ill musician... 'The Soloist': an extraordinary duet; “Parents have no lasting influence on their children’s personalities or on the way they behave outside the home.” Judith Rich Harris’s thesis still shocks. It’s time to move beyond the nature/nurture divide • · · Einstein, Salvador Dali, Tony Hancock, and Beach Boy Brian Wilson have little in common, except creative genius. And maybe psychosis. Creativity goes hand in hand with mental illness; Underdogs. When Vivek Ranadivé decided to coach his daughter’s basketball team, he chose to speak to the girls calmly, to convince them with reason and common sense. It was as if there were a kind of conspiracy in the basketball world about the way the game ought to be played • · · · MICHAEL Stephen Lange is Teflon on wheels: in his 34 years, the former nominee member of The Rebels outlaw motorcycle gang has had 33 brushes with the law. But not once has he been convicted on a charge associated with the serious crimes of which he has been accused Teflon 1; For global companies who use tax havens to route investments, the era of a tax-free ride may soon be over. Tax havens mostly cater to two kinds of clients: Businesses, who set up subsidiaries in order to legally benefit from a tax-free status; and individuals, who illegally stash cash here in order to evade taxes in their home countries. On May 5th, Obama referred to one building in the Cayman Islands that housed more than 18,000 companies as either the largest building in the world or the world's largest tax scam. Obama's initiatives are hardly surprising Teflon 2• · · · · Finally, NSW Government financial incentives have helped ensure a third instalment of the Nine Network's Underbelly series will be shot in Sydney. Underbelly is an AFI and Logie Award-winning 13-part Australian television mini-series, retelling the real events of the 1995–2004 gangland war in Melbourne. The series is based on the book Leadbelly: Inside Australia's Underworld, by The Age journalists John Silvester and Andrew Rule. Underbelly is produced by the Australian Film Finance Corporation, in association with Film Victoria.The executive producers are Des Monaghan and Jo Horsburgh. The lead-up to Underbelly involved a heavy marketing campaign which covered radio, print, billboards and an increased online presence, including the use of social networking tools. KINGS Cross nightclub entrepreneur John Ibrahim saw the television potential in the story years ago - Forget Melrose Place - John Ibrahim said in 1996, referring to the blockbuster drama of the decade. "The Royal Commission is a better soapie Dark underbelly ; Sydney's underbelly stirs with a vengeful attack on the Ibrahim family. Les Kennedy, Leesha mckenny and Peter Hawkins report from the scene Underbelly 3• · · · · · The Matthew Johns-Sharks affair is a story about the power of broadcast media, rather than about the morality of footballer culture Peddling outrage and disgust; A pair of executives for a one-time hedge fund to the stars has been charged with setting up bogus tax shelters for their clients. Jeffrey Greenstein, the former CEO of Seattle-based Quellos Group, and Charles Wilk, a principal of the firm, were indicted last week on tax fraud, wire fraud and money laundering charges. According to prosecutors, Greenstein and Wilk designed a tax shelter scheme that offered clients stock that had depreciated in value in order to offset large capital gains. But authorities say the shares never existed; a Senate investigation in 2006 found that Quellos created the bogus tax shelters with some $9.6 billion in phony securities transactions Ex-Hedgies Accused In Tax Shelter Scam

Wednesday, May 27, 2009

He always chose to teach the strugglers. He saw that task as the glory of our profession …

The economy may be slowing down, but everything else is speeding up. Margins collapse like a deck of cards, profits plunge (Fortune 500 companies earned 85% less than they did last year), and shoppers turn their backs in a flash. John Bargh from Yale reckons that we evaluate everything as good or bad in 0.25 seconds. That’s fast! The human mirror

How bad is the economy? It is definitely getting very bad!

Cats are so dramatic !

WE live on one planet and all its wisdom and stupidity are connected Courage under fire: Flow of Deep Wisdom A revolutionary new search engine that computes answers rather than pointing to websites will be launched officially today amid heated talk that it could challenge the might of Google.

Wolfram Alpha, named after Stephen Wolfram, the British-born computer scientist and inventor behind the project, takes a query and uses computational power to crunch through huge databases … Wolfram|Alpha, the brainchild of a company with a distinctly scientific bent, is challenging Google by offering a formatted aggregation of data

Saturday, May 23, 2009

Generation Y's assumed technological lead over earlier generations is being challenged. Both young and old alike only skim what they read online - but this is more a problem for the 'digital natives' who lack the information assessment skills of those trained to use conventional libraries. Books tell us that the first tax collectors in Australia were military men. One early collector was Captain John Piper, who as a naval officer in Sydney was responsible for overseeing the collection of customs and excise duties. His job allowed him to skim some off the top and he became one of the wealthiest men in the colony. To his credit, he did not harass tax debtors but was even known to invite them to dine at his mansion, which gave rise to the name of the suburb Point Piper. History section of the Daily Terror notes why STAFF of the Australian Taxation Office must cringe every time a treasurer delivers a budget The pay can be good but the work is taxing- Budgets beget expenses and inevitably the taxman cometh

I'll take Sydney to a brick: Golden years on hold with no silver lining Digital natives: Pathways to wisdom As Nick Samios blogged recently, the ASX is expected to shortly launch a residential property “derivatives” market based on the RP Data-Rismark Hedonic Indices.

Have to say, I don't mind the punt, and the SMH last week reported on a new way for me to part with my "hard earned". Soon we all might be able to trade derivative contracts based on indices compiled by Rismark/RPData and to be quoted daily on the sharemarket This style of derivative has been dreamed about for a long time. Many a banker I am sure would be wishing "if only we had this a few years back" as they tearfully tear up more and more money at MIP (mortgagee in possession) auctions. If you want to find out more about this, try contacting RP Data’s Research Director, Tim Lawless, at research@rpdata.com

Thursday, May 21, 2009

Spending so much time socialising via SMS, Facebook, email, YouTube, blogs, MySpace, Bebo, Flickr, Twitter, 12Seconds, RSS Feeds, Digg or Friendster is not good for us. Technology is taking away our privacy and our concentration but it is also taking away our ability to be alone. Though I shouldn't say taking away. We are doing this to ourselves; we are discarding these riches as fast as we can Social notworking?

Love Thy Neighbour ;-) Bronte sleuth finds Ponzi link to Biden There is a article about me and about the Bronte Capital blog in the Sydney Morning Herald today. It mentions that I diagnosed the economic problems in Eastern Europe by analysing the price of hookers. That is true as far as it goes – though the original post was more nuanced than that.

• JOHN HEMPTON, a former Platinum Asset Management banking analyst-turned-financial blogger living in Bronte; [Bronte Capital; Story of our lives ]• · Robert Higgs clears away many misconceptions surrounding a turbulent era that continues to shape today's headlines Depression, War, and Cold War ; Sadly the we appear unable to learn from history Afghanistan: it happened once before ... • · WE'VE heard of disaffected employees dissing their erstwhile company, but in this case can we "blame" former CEO Graham Kelly for sparking yesterday's share rally of up to 115 per cent? Responding to the ASX sheriffs, Novogen referred to a blog recently established by an ex-employee. The site in question is Kelly's Musings; THE Australian Taxation Office has moved against wealthy West Australian businessman Phillip Grimaldi, hitting him with a $35 million tax bill as part of Project Wickenby, the nation's largest tax probe Tax office hits Grimaldi with $35m Wickenby bill ; Country by country: a case study. Tax Research UK - Richard Murphy. A case study to explain How country by country reporting can work; Something pernicious is going on in the undergrowth. British tax havens are trying to establish clear blue water between their activities and those of their commercial rivals in Austria, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg and Switzerland. This is based on lies. Journalists please note: trusts are even more secretive than bank accounts and trusts are used in virtually all sophisticated tax evasion structures. When a PR person representing a tax haven claims it is transparent, simply ask them to take you straight away to the office of the registrar of trusts - and see how far that gets you. Lies, damned lies and tax haven nonsense ; How tax havens helped to create a crisis • · · Imported plain cotton pillow cases from France that cost more than $900 apiece and new bulldozers exported to Venezuela that cost $387 each. Such prices seem highly suspect -- and could be examples of someone using international trade to launder money Money launderers wash billions through international trade ; In recent years some tax havens, the Crown Dependencies, for example, claim that they have taken effective steps in the direction of making trusts and offshore companies more transparent. Time to tackle the offshore trusts ; The pseudo-investigations into the banking crisis are being run by firms with a History of unsavoury financial arrangements • · · · Have we reached an obsession tipping point with our fears? Shark attacks, avian flu, swine flu, SARS, terrorists ... what next? Living in fear ; Once it was proved that the atomic bomb worked, men discovered reasons to use it The USA’s unique deadly sin • · · · · When an Anthrax scare hit the Department of Human Services in Virginia's Arlington County in 2002, Christopher David, then the county's chief technology officer, sprang into action. "I knew there was a person who could help us [respond]," he says. "But I didn't remember his name or how to contact him." Rather than waste precious time searching through hundreds of documents housed on his desktop or in file cabinets, David opened his mind mapping application from http://www.webbrain.com/app/ PersonalBrain, entered a few keywords and, within moments, had the information he needed. In many mind mapping applications, you start with a central thought or idea, then add branches—or subcategories—to break down the topic. These subcategories could be thoughts or include links referencing more information, PDFs you can upload or reports to reference. There are plenty of applications to choose from out there, from to Freemind ; MindMeister• · · · · · The tale of how Greenpeace and McDonalds came together in Brazil reflects the complexities of a globalised economy Can a fast food company save the Amazon?; Putting trust in an engaged section of the public might be reciprocated by increased public trust in our political system Trust an engaged public; The establishment of the Office of the Information Commissioner is a key element of the Government's Freedom of Information ('FOI') reforms. The Government will provide $20.5 million over four years to establish and run the Office of the Information Commissioner. The Office will be a new statutory agency within the Prime Minister and Cabinet portfolio, supporting two new independent statutory office holders - the Information Commissioner and the Freedom of Information Commissioner. The Privacy Commissioner will also be incorporated in the new Office, bringing the functions of information privacy protection and FOI together in the new agency Budget measures: promoting integrity and accountability

A change in the weather is sufficient to recreate the world and ourselves Energy comes from feeling good If you don’t believe in the future you can’t participate fully in it. Make a list of all the things you always wanted to do and start working your way through it

It is important to live life to its full potential. Here is a list on the formula for a long life. It was proposed by 97-year-old expert physician Shigeaki Hinohara, a man who still chairs two large hospitals in Tokyo and has written around 150 books since is 75th birthday. Inspiration personified… Not surprising that such wisdom comes from Japan. This is a country that is experiencing the impacts of an aging population before the rest of us.

• He loved Big Brother. Orwell, 1984 Share what you know; [Like a dog! he said: it was as if he meant the shame of it to outlive him. Kafka, The Trial Top 25 Things Vanishing from KAFKA’S Amerika; After a while I went out and left the hospital and walked back to the hotel in the rain. A Farewell to Arms Generally, when people see the question "What should I do with my life?", it triggers some major misunderstandings. The author presents a few of the major fallacies he thinks people project onto this dilemma What should I do with my life now?]• · While the title might lead you to believe this is a story about a 30 something's unsuccessful search for love, nothing could be further from truth. Over one messy year, Ross and Natalie navigate their children, nits, housework, birthdays, Christmas, faith, football, job insecurity, more nits – Great story for our times ;-) My Year Without Sex is kind of a love story about a family dealing with all the big questions and even more of the small ones; This is not merely about making formal government publications available online. It is about capturing, nurturing, and maintaining much of the information generated by public sector bodies as a common and easily accessible good for all of society. At a policy level, these developments will combine to bring about an entirely new landscape for the management and control of information and knowledge in the public sector Realising the value of public information • · After 100 days in the Oval Office, President Obama merits a mixed report card - As Goes General Motors, So Goes the Country? Obama’s First 100 Days: A Mixed Record ; One bird said to Billy Pilgrim Poo-tee-weet? Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse 5: Forecasting used to be straightforward. Over the years, by the end of the first quarter, managers usually had a fairly reliable sense of how the business was shaping up and whether targets would be met, missed or exceeded. Confidence in quarterly and annual predictions was so high that coming in above or below by even the smallest amount was considered a surprise and set off moves in stock prices. This year, however, things have changed. Re-thinking risk management: why the mindset matters more than the model;• · · Organisations like 'Reporting the World' are working to ensure the news gets presented to consumers in a fair, balanced manner - The winds of change are blowing through American media. So say the enterprising campaigners for peace and social justice at Avaaz.org, an independent not-for-profit organisation with offices in six countries. Avaaz means voice - in many languages, and their team works to ensure that the views and values of the world’s people inform global decision-making How conflict is represented in the media; The news the public reads or receives in the safety of their sitting rooms may have cost a journalist his or her life A fatal job. How many journalists have to die?; • · · · Hello, I am a Golden Guru and I am here to help you ... Golden Guru or boring old nuisance?; The planets may no longer be aligned to Peter Costello’s aspirations: he may have forgone his opportunity Costello’s destiny call?• · · · · Pastor who is making lots of waves in Germany and France: July 2008, when God showed him how we were about to experience a financial tsunami Pastor Joh. W. Matutis; Antipodes Map – has taken illustrates the opposite point (antipodes) of anywhere on the planet. Sure it's a game, but it shows something profound about human beings and what drives them Antipodes Map • · · · · · Politicians should defend the public interest, not Pratt's reputation ; Richard Pratt, billionaire, philanthropist and head of the Visy packing industry, died on April 28, 2009. The day before he died, the Federal Court ruled that a large part of the evidence against Mr Pratt in relation to evidence he had given about a price-fixing cartel was inadmissible GOD HAS THE LAST WORD...Mr Pratt's fall from grace

Monday, May 18, 2009

Yes, I was one of the 50 million people who downloaded Britain's Got Talent on YouTube to watch Susan Boyle sing her dear heart out. I laughed my ass off when Tina did Sarah and Amy did Hillary on Saturday Night Live, and I loved Jon Stewart's smart take-down of that Mad Money guy Jim Cramer. But when I first heard news of a deadly flu killing hundreds of people in Mexico, I didn't' go to YouTube, The Daily Show or Saturday Night Live to get the details. I read an AP story online For the Love of Blog, We Need Hard News

Friday, May 15, 2009

For years now I haven’t read any newspapers: - I shall not go into the reasons. This often leads to bizarre conversations:Other: What do you think of Barack Obama?Dragon Comes to Town: I don’t know who you’re talking about.Other: How are you coping with the recession?Dragon Comes to Town: What recession? If you spend all your time reading books you won’t have any experiences. Of course it may give you some idea about what experiences to have. There's more to life than books you know, but not much more … History must be written of, by and for the survivors. Learn to write with pain. It may come as a great shock to my readers to discover that I wasn't always the elegantly dressed, highly attuned citizen of the world they have come to know. Far from it. In fact, for some time I was a quite clearly deranged wild-haired youth dressed in motley and living in hippie squalor in the gatehouse to a castle on the Hudson, in company with three dogs and three glowing specimens of my own species. Cold River: A good title is a work of genius

The places I go are never there Read, read, read and then read some more To begin, let us take the Japanese literally in the last line so it reads "water of sound." Let that roll around a few minutes in your imagination. The water of sound. Sound as water. Sound moving as water does. Sound rippling outward as water does when disturbed. If the narrative of this book is even half as good as the artwork, this one looks like a real keeper.

Being with you is like swimming in the sun on a warm Summer's day.

• Write, but live a little first The fact that the smallest literary form - haiku - has the most rules never ceases to amaze and astound; [Nothing prepares a writer better than reading the works of accomplished writers. It helps you find your own voice. Read: old pond / a frog jumps in / the sound of water; The old is new again: Crazy I think I'll dive into the band much further Blurred Vision: One Woman’s Memoir of Looking Beyond Abuse and Alcoholism The title The Truth About Lies has a 10.2% chance of being a bestselling title!]• · Do you remember the first book you ever bought? One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn is a mere 144 pages long; Ooooooo K. Let’s get a couple of things straight here before we start. If kisses fail, how about licks? Seeker, Fool with a short Prologue and an Epilogue • · Genrification? Very unique? Publishers today! Honestly! Splutter. Cough. Scents of tweed and pipe tobacco, sounds as of choking on whisky All commercial fiction needs to be like Dan Brown; The Espresso Book Machine is billed as the biggest thing to hit the book world since Gutenberg invented the printing press Revolutionary Espresso Book Machine; It was also an article I never wanted to read, but here I am, Media Dragon and I, making the best of a bad situation. While being a bookworm may not be a precondition for becoming a mass murderer, it’s certainly no impediment. Hitler’s Private Library: The Books That Shaped His Life • · · We are seeing the impact on readers and neighborhoods, with 5 million readers now behind on their reading. Some are just walking away from novels they should never have been reading in the first place. What began as a sub-prime reading problem has spread to other, less-risky readers, and contributed to excess inventories. These troubled novels are now parked, or frozen, on the shelves of libraries, bookstores, and other reading institutions, preventing them from financing readable novels. a proposed bailout of the US publishing industry ; The single funniest sentence-opening of 2009 so far (and easy odds-on favorite for the whole year), from Leslie Bennetts' profile of brainless trophy-bird Gisele Bundchen-Brady, from the latest issue of Vanity Fair: An avid reader, Gisele ... Hee. Too precious. Seven things are hidden from men. These are the day of death, the day of consolation, the depth of judgement; no man knows what is in the mind of his friend; no man knows which of his business ventures will be profitable, or when the kingdom of the house of David will be restored, or when the sinful kingdom will fail. Delaying the Messiah • · · · Following in the footsteps of the New York Times, the Guardian asked 150 literary luminaries to vote for the best novel to come out of the British Commonwealth between 1980 and 2005. Here are the results in order: Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee; Money by Martin Amis; Earthly Powers by Anthony Burgess and Atonement by Ian McEwan both tying for third, Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald, Unconsoled by Kazuio Ishiguro, Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie, Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro and Amongst Women by John McGahern tying for eighth, and That They May Face the Rising Sun by John McGahern. The publication also lists several of the other nominees. Cold River; Fiction may be the last refuge of the outrageous, the last redoubt of Orwell’s thought crime. Moreover, even the freedom to be outrageous in fiction is under threat. No, incorrect and careless chatter, / words mispronounced, thoughts ill-expressed / evoke emotion's pitter-patter.... –Pushkin A strange collaborative criticism blog• · · · · They pass it round secretly, under the eyes of the police, in the guise of books and poems. The anodyne pretext of literature allows them to offer you at a rock-bottom price this deadly ferment which it is high time to make generally available for consumption. It is the genie in the bottle, it is the gold of poetry in a solid bar. Buy, buy the damnation of your soul, at last you are going to lose your way, here is the machine guaranteed to capsize the mind. I announce to the world this momentous news item: a new vice has just been born man has acquired one more source of vertigo--Surrealism, offspring of frenzy and darkness. Blog by book lovers for book lovers; Demon of conjectures, fever of phantasmagoria, pass your sulphurous and nacreous fingers through your tow hair and answer me: who is Prato, and on the first floor with its paradoxical lift what is this agency which I am obstinately convinced must be a vast organization in white-slave traffic. This is Not a Novel • · · · · · The bitterest love poetry you'll ever read - George Meredith's Modern Love – The critic is madder than the poet; Kundera deepens his thesis of the novelist's essential attitude to History-with-a-capital-H in his new suite of essays, The Curtain (La Rideau):Because History, with its agitations, its wars, its revolutions and counter-revolutions, its national humiliations, does not interest the novelist for itself – as a subject to paint, to denounce, to interpret. The novelist is not a valet to historians; History may fascinate him, but because it is a kind of searchlight circling around human existence and throwing light onto it, onto its unexpected possibilities, which, in peaceable times, when History stands still, do not come to the fore but remain unseen and unknown. The last observatory

Sunday, May 10, 2009

As the reviewers noted, The explosive debut album from Sydney funk maestros Dojo Cuts pulls no punches on its way to delivering a string of killer blows ...

Out of all of R&B's subgenres over the years, Funk is one of the most underrated. Funk may have fallen out of vogue in the 1980s, but it's contributions to the music scene still reverberate today. Hip-Hop's g-funk sound, which was popular with West Coast artists in the early-to-mid 1990s is based on Funk, and acts like the Red Hot Chili Peppers have carried the Funk sound forward in this decade. And on that note, your Guide to R&B presents his picks for the best Funk artists of all time.George Clinton is known as the Godfather of Funk and is one of the longest-lasting artists ever in any music genre. In the 1970s he was the mastermind behind the innovative, groundbreaking bands Parliament and Funkadelic and played a significant part in the creation of numerous hit Funk songs, including "Flashlight" and "One Nation Under a Groove." He has also had success as a solo artist and is still an active performer today.

Now ought to be always like now, always, but the more time passes the more now seems to be a shadow of then…

In the same dreamI am lying in the hollow of a boat,My forehead and eyes against the curved planksWhere I can hear the undercurrentsStriking the bottom of the boat.All at once, the prow rises up,And I think that we’ve come to the estuary,But I keep my eyes against the woodThat smells of tar and glue.Too vast, too luminous the imagesThat I have gathered in my sleep.Why rediscover, outside,The things that words tell me of,But without convincing me,I desire a higher or less somber shore.Yves Bonnefoy: The House Where I Was Born

Write all the same, in spite of despair. No: with despair. I don't know what to call that despair. Writing to one side of what precedes writing is always to ruin it. And yet we must accept this: ruining the failure means coming back toward another book, toward another possibility of the same book. Space for writers and readers Book lovers across Australia will again get virtual front row seats for the highlight events of the Sydney Writers' Festival 2009 It must be time for the Sydney Writers Festival

The Still Water: Keeper of Light and Dust Tottering StateHow on earth did anyone get the idea that people can communicate with one another by letter! Of a distant person one can think, and of a person who is near one can catch hold - all else goes beyond human strength. Writing letters, however, means to denude oneself before the ghosts, something for which they greedily wait. Written kisses don't reach their destination, rather they are drunk on the way by the ghosts. - Kafka, in a letter to Milena (Havel also wrote similar sentiment - In Letters to Olga)

light (drugs as only altering positions of piles of chemicals).light as feeling? i.e. pulse waves(what happens to thingsmoving away faster than the speed of light? does light dieout?). Jesus, Shakespeare, Hitler, etc. (political waves?) goingout from planet like heart beats.light. dream being the mixed waves of feeling from other'mind' sources during darkness our consciousness(un is notsub) due to nearness of clear light source (reflected light orwhat? mirrors?). day night: artificial light destroys balance(midnight sun?). god is the space between thoughts, no, that's simplistic. some- times you can't understand the words but you know the medicine is right

• Every question you ask presupposes an alternative universe Things of your time are influenced by the past; [Anxious apes and giant insects: Kafka's uneasy visions at Prague Airport . Franz Kafka was a man of peculiar habits. An insomniac who lived with his parents for most of his life, the Czech fiction writer would sit at his desk from 10pm to dawn writing stories in one long outpouring. A "supreme power", he believed, kept his hand moving across the page. He was also a depressive hypochondriac, averse to any kind of sound - a cough, whisper or a door closing jangled his nerves - and was appalled by the taste and texture of food, restricting himself to a bland vegetarian diet (the idea of consuming meat horrified him) and masticating each bite more than 100 times, a habit that disgusted his fellow diners Difference between music and noise; EVEN before he left the church in 2000, former archbishop of Edinburgh and Episcopalian primus Richard Holloway was no stranger to controversy. Doubting cleric's church in exile ]• · Being human is not a simple matter of stimulus and response: it is shaped by history, thought, time, and space – not to mention tears, snot, and earwax. There’s more to humans than biological burps; First, in a fit of irony, Czech rebel I remember not so much the rest dear America what pieces of me will you keep? Dear America, do you remember that the dope was dry shake all stems and seeds all cut with • · What does a woman want? Does she know? Does science know? Is this a deeply unanswerable question? Optimists and pessimists are people who consistently get the probabilities wrong. A realist, supposedly, gets it just right. Meredith Chivers is a creator of bonobo pornography. ; Road novels, stories, and gangster films of the 1930s depicted American social mobility as a bitter cheat. We may now relive 1930s art. Will This Crisis Produce a 'Gatsby'? • · · STEFAN AUST was the editor of Der Spiegel from 1994 to 2008. He worked with Ulrike Meinhof on the left-wing publication Konkret in the late Sixties. The film, The Baader Meinhof Complex, is based on his book. Released in the UK last November, the film is produced by Bernd Eichinger (Downfall) and stars cast members from the Academy Award-winning The Lives of Others. 21 May event 128: The Baader Meinhof Complex: Screening and Q&A with Stefan Aust ; EVEN during the 1970-77 heyday of the Red Army Faction -- West German terrorists also known as the Baader-Meinhof gang -- the group operated in a claustrophobic, paranoid atmosphere. We were afraid of discussion; itseemed like treachery, Astrid Proll, who was a junior member of the gang, tells Baader-Meinhof author Stefan Aust. And we triedfending off danger by involving ourselves in it more and more. Illegality became an endin itself, the means of holding the grouptogether. Clear-eyed look at violent fanatics; As Wendy Were planned her third Sydney Writers' Festival, Barack Obama was elected US President, Kevin Rudd completed his first year as Prime Minister, and the world economy collapsed. Undercover reveals the Strange Sydney Scenes• · · · Not All Newspapers Are Hurting for Money. Who needs anti-depressants, happy endings or chocolate pudding when you can wallow in a blog like this? ...especially when it's worthless; Professional pollster and PR guy Mark Penn writes in today’s Wall Street Journal that more Americans are making their primary income from posting their opinions than Americans working as computer programmers, firefighters or even bartenders, and that there are almost as many people making their living as bloggers as there are lawyers. This is wrong )Mark Penn’s Completely Invented WSJ Article(• · · · · A lot of magazines are thinking about raising their rates, Stephanie Clifford writes in the New York Times, in an effort to offset the decline in advertising. Link Roundup: Rethinking Publishing’s Business Model ; Explanations from Amazon have been few, vague, and conflicting. Sorry for "sexist" prize Censorship in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction• · · · · · Oh dear. Am I still allowed to write in a strait-jacket? Silence is a shape that has passed. Practically everyone I had met in Prague [....] had told me to be cool and live in the present moment. Living in the ‘now’ seemed to be the state religion, even if most people – strangely enough – seemed busy working on the technology of the future. BooksAndBeyond.com - Download free Audiobooks and Ebooks ; Today I was going to do an elaborate post on the fine line between insanity and perseverance in pursuing a writing career. Life had obviously got wind of my promise to defeat pessimism and had decided to take me seriously. It was all part of the strange and disturbing power of the book. It was making stuff happen in my life, it was forcing me to be optimistic. The View from Here Insanity Test! Learn the rules; and then forget them - Basho

Monday, May 04, 2009

At the noisy end of the cafe, head bentover the table, an old man sits alone,a newspaper in front of him.

And in the miserable banality of old agehe thinks how little he enjoyed the yearswhen he had strength, eloquence, and looks.

He knows he's aged a lot: he sees it, feels it.Yet it seems he was young just yesterday.So brief an interval, so brief.

And he thinks of Prudence, how it fooled him,how he always believed - what madness -that cheat who said: Tomorrow. You have plenty of time.

He remembers impulses bridled, the joyhe sacrificed. Every chance he lostnow mocks his senseless caution.

But so much thinking, so much rememberingmakes the old man dizzy. He falls asleep,his head resting on the cafe table ;-)

-Poems by Orhan Veli

The river rises, flows over its banks / and carries us all away, as mayflies floating downstream.” Gilgamesh, like many later thinkers, learned something about nothing NOTHING TO THINK ABOUT

A crisis is a terrible thing to waste I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life Plato called it “the greatest incentive to evil,” and maybe he was right. Yet we all succumb to pleasure: booze, chocolate, sex – or just a warm bath

We Brits have a way of feeling guilty about our pleasures, as if there were something morally dubious, or beyond the merely vulgar, in the pursuit of happiness enshrined in the constitution of our more overtly fun﷓loving American cousins. This is not an issue addressed by Paul Martin in his extensive survey of the pros and cons of pleasure, and its bittersweet role in all our lives. Mercifully, however, he does seem to conclude that pleasure-seeking is, on balance, a good thing, for all the efforts of religious and (often) socio-political forces to persuade us otherwise.

• A wild slippery beast; [Sashenka experienced the despair of the damned. The unthinkable had happened.” Interrogated in Stalin’s terror, she broke Man of Steel; Could be. But Joel Stein wants a positive spin. Maybe, “Hollywood: now more Jews than ever!” or “Hollywood, from the people who brought you the Bible”. Do Jews control Hollywood? ]• · Stop paying taxes? Escape to the woods? Sit in? Why not go vegetarian instead?; At our desk, on the road, or on a remote beach, the world is a keyboard tap away. It’s so cool never to be alone. The End of Alone • · The snub of the century. It was T.S. Eliot himself who rejected George Orwell’s Animal Farm for publication by Faber and Faber.. An allegory on Stalin’s dictatorship; Marx was wrong. The opiate of the masses isn’t religion, but spectator sports, says David Barash. It’s in our genes. The Roar of the Crowd• · · Why, my friend asked, was I so quiet? I said my kid was in the hospital. Leukemia? I wanted to tell her I would hack off my right arm for it to be as simple as cancer The monster inside my son ; Nuria (Manuela Velles) storytelling is gripping and that, in the end, the film is desperately moving. - This film is an adventure of the emotions inspired by the real-life story of a captivating eleven-year-old who is faced with two completely new situations in her life: falling in love and dying. A child's suffering for sainthood. Some are in tears, all are moved by the tragedy of her going. At the same time, her mother and priest seem less intent on easing her through the final hours of life than monitoring her progress into heaven. When she grows fearful, they panic as if the resilience of her faith is more important to them than Camino herself. It's a scene which leaves you feeling queasy and things don't get any better Camino from the Spanish word camino meaning"way, path or road: Opus Dei • · · · Alas, poor Kafka. In the eighty-odd years since his death, the deification of Franz Kafka has reduced his work to the level of aphorism An Alienation Artist: Kafka and His Critics Kafkaesque: the nonchalant intrusion of the bizarre and horrible into everyday life, the subjection of ordinary people to an inscrutable fate Australia, Australia (Amerika, Amerika); Kamila Stosslova, though not caring much for Leos Janácek’s music, turns out to have been his ideal muse: an empty canvas for his fantasies. Affair; • · · · · Culture – literature and the other arts – are functionally significant features of human evolution. Literature depends on literacy; Long live philosophers! As any good analyst would point out, that’s not just a spirited apostrophe. It’s a fact. For Philosophers, Dead Is the New 90 • · · · · · Hitler loved high society: he wanted to be seen with bluebloods and celebrities of film, music, art, theatre, and sports. Vases, Tea Sets, Cigars, His Own Watercolours; Why is it that novels about men in boats (Moby-Dick, Huckleberry Finn) are treated as important, while ones about women in houses (House of Mirth) are not?.. Why can't a woman write the Great American Novel? ; Literary prize-fighting. The sniping, the joke awards, the populist panels: Tom Chatfield looks at the tired landscape of literary prizes. First Drafts

Sunday, May 03, 2009

Water water and cold rivers everywhere ...

Ach, It took me 5 years (even more as I spent some time away from Bondi - in Prague and Sunshine Coast) to become the real long service iceberger. As our cheeky Lofty says The Bondi Icebergs are the part of winter swimming club with the strictest attendance requirements for their members ... So winter is here and the ice is calling this very Sunday morning

You were four years old (not 18 or so)

I picked you up from Belle Hill child care.

You were excited about learning to dance flaminco that day.

Walking home you told me all about it.

You were so excited

Then you got quiet and said,

I love you - Daddy

The moment of you and Vella froze in my memory.

Dojo Cuts feat. Roxie Ray aka Sasha. She dreamed the dream. She had to, didn't she. She just had to dance the dream. Sing it, be it, live it, dream the dream and have the dream dream her. And landing a deal as Sydney’s Got Talent Our Music is a secret order

Portrait of Dojo Cuts Songstress, Sasha

Music is something very essential in life. In Prague and in Sydney good music is spreading everywhere - if you go to a wedding, a funeral, you have music. It's not just entertainment; it is food for your soul. Place to be and to hear. Dojo wants to see if we dare to be vulnerable and let our guards down and just feel the music. And if we do, maybe something magical will happen. Some of it sounds like something out of a Fellini movie Dojo + Cuts grooves on the soul in the blues

Friday, May 01, 2009

I had a bitter sweet dream (nightmarish dream) of all those May Marches under communist Czechoslovakia as a child and teenager ... And these days I face the strange Chinese culture in the Antipodean share market and almost at every newsagency on the corners of harder and harder to recognise Sydney

If you must write, you must do it in the face of all opposition. […] Do not spend too much more time on culture & reading, these are traps. When everything conspires to make the thing impossible, when you are tired, worried, with no time, or money, it is then that things get done.
~ Samuel Beckett to Claude Raimbourg, 16 May 1954

A tale of Cold River, manages to trap a tiny speck of theatre of absurd of the kommunist Czechoslovakia in amber and then put time in a bottle, forever uniting them in our collective memory and imagination ... History has failed us, but no matter

"... The most important expression which the present age has found… a book to which we are all indebted, and from which none of us can escape.”
~ T.S. Eliot lauding 'Cold River' in our dreams ;-)

A fluent stream of words awakens suspicion within me. I prefer stuttering for in stuttering I hear the friction and the disquiet, the effort to purge impurities from the words, the desire to offer something from inside you. Smooth, fluent sentences leave me with a feeling of uncleanness, of order that hides emptiness.
~An Untouchable Fire: Remembering Aharon Appelfeld

“We begin to live when we have conceived life as tragedy.”
W.B. Yeats, The Trembling of the Veil

Within a few generations almost all of us will be forgotten. Those who are not will have no bearing on how we are remembered, who we once were. We will not be there to protest, to correct. In the end we might exist only as a prop in someone else’s story: a plot device, a golem.

Only an artist can tell what it is like for anyone who gets to this planet to survive it. What it is like to die, or to have somebody die; what it is like to be glad
~ James Baldwin

Defying every expectation of what communism used to be, imagine a system where the key to success wasn’t hard work or merit, but conniving and politics. If you sold your soul to the devil, you were rewarded Hey Millennials: Communism Sucks, I Lived It

It is not in the nature of politics that the best men should be elected. The best men do not want to govern their fellowmen.
— George MacDonald, born in 1824

Wisdom listens ... As the wise Vrbov Cemetery mortalist, David BenATAR, once noted even turning blood into ink is bad as "our lives are ultimately meaningless. We cannot satisfy the need for meaning in the mundane." Our human 'iron curtain like' predicament also means that it is impossible to realise genuine escape: "We are in a bind, a fix, a jam, we can't get out, and there is no one to help us ...We are caught in an "existential vise" between life and death ..."

Kneading memory makes the dough of fiction; which we know, sometimes never stops rising ...

The Cold (War) River is finished, I am sensible how imperfectly, but certainly to the best of my limited abilities ... WE HAVE NO VOICE, AND SOMETIMES IN THIS SHORT LIFE ON EARTH WE MUST SCREAM!

"We Became River"
A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it."
— G. K. Chesterton via AFL Legend and a Briliant Aboriginal Mittleuropean Mark Heiss

According to a quote sometimes attributed to not so great Jozef Imrich and the great Albert Einstein: "It's not that I'm so smart, it's just that I stay in trouble and with problems longer."

“To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child. For what is the worth of human life, unless it is woven into the life of our ancestors by the records of history?”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero

There is nothing original about me except a little original bohemian sin.
I hope you will be treated unfairly ...

"My position is that you cannot work towards peace being peaceful. If the peace is to be one where everybody’s quiet and doesn’t open up ... share what’s unspeakable ... offer unsolicited criticism ... defend others’ rights to speak and encourage discourse — that peace is worth nothing. It reminds me of the kind of peace that was secured in my old country under the Communist regime. That is the death of democracy. That might have consequences as bad as war—bloody war and conflict. So, to prevent the world from bloody conflict, we must sustain a certain kind of adversarial life in which we are struggling with our problems in public."
~ Krzysztof Wodiczko

“The more one suffers, the more, I believe, has one a sense for the comic. It is only by the deepest suffering that one acquires true authority in the use of the comic, an authority which by one word transforms as by magic the reasonable creature one calls man into a caricature.”
~ Søren Kierkegaard, Stages on Life’s Way

"Cold River's" history keeps her secrets longer than most of us. But she has one secret that I will reveal to you tonight in the greatest confidence. Sometimes there are no winners at all. And sometimes nobody needs to lose. [Cold as ice, but in the soulful hands the story melts ... a literary treat you, insomniacs, can enjoy for years (because that's how long it will take you to get through it ...)]
~ John le Carre

Thomas Aquinas’s ultimate act of apparent humility occurred on December 6, 1273, St. Nicholas’s Day, when he was forty-eight or forty-nine years old. Aquinas was celebrating Mass in the chapel of St. Nicholas, and he again had a vision. What exactly he saw is unknown. But afterward, he did not resume his dictation as he usually would. Reginald prodded him to get back to work, but Aquinas responded, “I can do no more; such things have been revealed to me that all that I have written seems to me as so much straw.” He stopped writing altogether, leaving his Summa Theologiae—the summary of theology, and his masterwork—incomplete.

“An author frequently chooses solemn or overwhelming subjects to write about; he is so impressed at writing about Life and Death that he does not notice that he is saying nothing of the slightest importance about either.”
~Randall Jarrell, “Ten Books” (The Southern Review, Autumn 1935)

François-Marie Arouet aka Voltaire tends to share the most profound observation: “God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh”

However meaningless and vain, however dead life appears, the man of faith, of energy, of warmth … steps in and does something. So, the poet Robert Frost said, "no tears in the writer, no tears in the reader".
Is it more foolish to risk your life or risk wasting your life? To live at all is miracle enough ...

Q. How did you get into philosophy in the first place?
A. Failure
— a soulmate, Simon Critchley

MEdia Dragons are keen observers of leadership and politics in all its drama and absurdity.

“My theory has always been to write a real small story against a big background.”
~ Burt Kennedy

As Dr Cope once observed about knowledge and wisdom "...all the data in the world is in the ocean, however the value is in the fish"

There’s so much that’s unsayable and unspeakable about Iron Curtain escapes, but when it comes time for the story to be told, it takes over...There is more to it than any summary could hope to capture.

Dylan Thomas pointed out that the best craftsmanship always leaves holes and gaps ... so that something that is not in the poem can creep, crawl, flash or thunder in.

Prose should be a long intimacy between strangers with no direct appeal to what both may have known. It should slowly appeal to feelings unexpressed, it should in the end draw tears out of the stone.
— Henry Green

Cold River is like a secret image, a photograph is a secret about a secret. It is about surviving and playing the cards that are dealt you, even if it looks like a losing hand. The more it tells you the less you know... The anthropological folkloric tale is about the strange relationship between a secret and knowledge. A secret is, necessarily, relational—like difference, it needs another just to exist, whether to be shared in confidence or because it cannot be shared. It is a perfect book for paranoid times ...

'This story is more than a history of escapes. It’s not easy to say where, exactly, you would shelve it. It could be under memoir. Or is it more like anthropology? . . . The other option would be farce just like the life under communism ...
The aim of Cold River is to prepare a person for death...

"We all know that funny feeling of filthiness, of contagious ickiness. It's a feeling we call the prick of conscience when we make a compromise that we have doubts about. So we think about it again and again, and... we even worry about it somewhat, even though the compromise may have made life easier, compared to what would have happened had we not made it. But for myself...I see that my bravery comes out of cowardice, because I am afraid of feeling that ickiness of feeling that I've done something wrong, that I've made an undesirable compromise, that I've side-stepped; and conversely when I do something that I know is right, I can even have a feeling of euphoria."
~ Vaclav Havel

"We acknowledge the traditional owners and custodians of country throughout Australia and their continuing connection to land, waters and community. We pay our respect to them and their cultures, and elders past and present."

Frequently, one of the best ways to get insight into a culture is through its humour ...
So under communism when we wanted to hear God laugh, we made meticulously planned escapes from the totalitarian regimes. Our young fragile ironic stories under totalitarianism were not crying out to be told. And yet ....

Mark Twain once said, “The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why.”

Like the ForeReads or Outline, Cold River and Media Dragon are not for everyone. It's for bohemians like you...
Outline

Good blogging like journalism is sharing what somebody else does not want printed; everything else is public relations... It is our business to know something about every subject – or to know where to get the knowledge (Dr Cope, J Hatton, MO'N etc ) One of our strengths is finding stories in unexpected places ...

MEdia Dragons are known for their 6-foot-2 stature and are often expected by totalitarian characters to play villains... There’s a deeper poetry and music that runs through and beneath the Cold River...

“Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you."
~Matthew 7:7 (Ask, Seek, Knock )

Consider why you should not go through life without seeking Simon Sinek or seeking the story of the Cold River ...Please suspend your disbelief: “I write about my father and mother, their generation, and my own limited experience, our struggle for individual freedom and self-expression in the Mitteleuropean Orwelean society. Fearlessness in those without power is maddening to those who have it. We need to remember that all rivers are fearless and free. They come and go as they please, and borders or governments do not bind them. All rivers are filled with liquid histories and stories. Shame, failure, despair, utter horror, these are all stations on the journey, even after completing a ‘draft of a draft.' Slavic Blues Memoir, the offspring of the slave narrative ...
Certain stories that get virtually no traction nevertheless involve phenomena that are quite important in understanding the way the world operates. For instance, not a lot of people know that 'Cold River' is everywhere as it is the history of the entire world: As every of the tyrant it has deposed ...
Many things in life – oh so many more than we think – can never be explained at all...
“One must be something in order to do something,” Goethe counseled a young friend in 1824 ..." Our story emerges from our bones! And why we are not satisfied with simply making an impression; why do we want to mark our readers and listeners for life?"

Great writing is like diving: anybody can get from the platform to the pool—or the pavement—but some, with grace and sweat and just a bit of swag, can make that brief passage through the air angelic in its beauty and terror. “We started talking about dying long before the first one of us jumped ...

"No one leaves home, unless home is the mouth of a shark. You only run for the border when you see your whole city running as well. You have to understand that no one puts children in a boat, unless the water is safer than the land."
~ 'Home' by Warsan Shire

If you are in the business of finding out what’s true — whether that business is social science, military intelligence, journalism, the hard sciences or something else — there is an elusive quality you find among the best in the field. It might be called the Cold Eye. It’s not a term you will find in textbooks. It’s a matter of character as much as professional skill. It’s some combination of having the mental discipline to gird yourself against your own biases, the instinct to resist the tendency to think that knowledge once learned is static and an ability to look at more signals, data points and ideas from disparate places than other people usually do.
Perhaps more important, the Cold Eye is motivated by a deep intellectual independence and a passionate psychological connection to telling the truth.
~ Tom Rosenstiel

I even ignored advice to change my name ... If I wasn't Jozef Imrich, I'd probably think that Jozef Imrich has a lot of answers myself.

Most writers waste people’s time with too many words. I’m trying to reduce everything
down to the minimum. My last work will be a blank piece of paper.
— Beckett

What an ordinary, artificial life I’ve led. And how ordinary and artificial it is to write about it, as if for ‘posterity’. What do I have to say? In an absolute sense, nothing. And that’s what I’m saying.
— Frenet, Journal

... “If a man hasn’t discovered something he will die for, he isn’t fit to live.” ~ Martin Luther King, Jr
“Show me somethin’ dat caution ever made!”
~ Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God Freedom or Death: Ondrej a Milan
"I have one consistency, which is being against the totalitarian – on the left and on the right. The Totalitarian is the enemy

There are no depths of irony, or bad taste, to which extreme communists or rotten capitalists won’t sink if they think they can grab power or make money out of it...

We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come… We live everything as it comes, without warning.

We can only compare Cold River to reading the Bible :-) So escape the beaten path ...

When you read your own work as something fresh, something strange, it can be very exciting – especially if there’s time to make revisions. But then, once published, you almost inevitably discover typos, mistakes, and causes for regret and even remorse. As in a lover’s quarrel, sometimes we wish we could take the words back. But it’s almost never possible. …

Breaking News

“The Edge... There is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, Hell's Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga

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Get comfortable with being uncomfortable, because this is where the magic happens.
It may seem really strange but I feel as though I actually died some time ago and I’m living in an afterlife. Only in the age of Amazon.com age is a Tale like Cold River by Imrich possible … in 21st century after all,the greatest things in life are shared on the web
Cold River: fast-moving digital waters

“If you know how to read, you do not need many books […] Learn to meditate on a few lines, even from a mediocre author; nothing bears fruit unless it is rooted in meditation.”
~ Jean-Baptiste Henri-Dominique Lacordaire (1802-1861), the French priest who reestablished the Dominican Order after it was neutralized following the French Revolution

We are not the wordly boys we used to be on the interrete. We are no longer desirable, We are off-putting in some way. It’s not just that We have put on weight, or that our face are puffy from the drinking and the lack of sleep; it’s as if people can see the damage written all over us, they can see it in my face, the way we hold ourselves the way we move ...

Maybe we are crazy. Maybe we will change the world: If you live life to the point of tears every Negative has a Positive, You just have to look for it. Blogs Help to filter the world ;-) Without Struggle/No Freedom ...

Sole survivors might often be thought of as anonymous, but we never want to be voiceless. Why true stories and icebergs say so much ... The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. Till taught by pain or borders less travelled, men really know not what freedom's worth: # Each Age Calls forth its own Bohemian Voice... Elena Ferrante

Sandra Cisneros tells us, Write about what makes you different.
Your readers want to see the world through your eyes ... A sole survivor explores the world where the 'other' fears to tread and creates the most unlikely true story you'll ever read. You are different and so is Cold River:

There may be no greater act of bravery for someone with a fear of needles than to donate blood. Of course, it's this kind of giving that is so important to maintaining the Red Cross's life-saving stocks

What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist, wrote Salman Rushdie. The Iron Curtain came down since Rushdie's novel, the Satanic Verses, earned the Booker Prize-winning novelist death threats, but the question persists.

MEDIA DRAGON We search the world ... So you can read thoughtful and down to earth media dragons at one place

Can one person make a difference? It's easy to be cynical about the power of one. But a person's importance, so difficult to quantify in life, is perhaps more easily measured in death – and the gaping holes left behind